This is the new Introduction to 'Steps to an
Ecology of Mind' written by Mary Catherine Bateson for the impending re-publication of
Gregory Bateson's book by the University of Chicago, due for release in the year 2000. It
is many years since the book was available in English, as we can see also by the
increasing frequency of requests from all over the world to this web site for help in
tracking down the odd available copy here and there. So it is with a great pleasure that I
can announce this imminent new edition of one of Gregory Bateson's most important texts,
and at the same time thank Catherine Bateson very much for sending me her fresh
introduction to the book which I reproduce below.

This book is the record of an intellectual journey. Steps. One step at
a time. The destination, a new science, was just becoming clear as it went to press in
1971. Gregory Bateson died in 1980 but the intellectual journey continues, with increasing
urgency, and needed clues to the understanding of patterns of relationship are still to be
discovered in these texts.

Some of the most impressive achievements of the last years of the
twentieth century may indeed have obscured understanding. The extraordinary and detailed
work of mapping the human genome, for instance, makes it easy to forget that the
individual phenotype is formed by the interaction of genetic factors, not by any of them
in isolation; and all of them are expressed in a complex dance with the surrounding
environment, air and earth and other organisms. Even with current progress in chaos and
complexity theory, we remain less skilled at thinking about interactions than we are at
thinking about entities, things. We know far more about how computers can be designed to
compute and about the structure and biochemistry of the organ called the brain than we did
when Gregory was writing, but this has led to a kind of triumphalism, as if such research
would eventually explain the creative imagination.

Gregory Bateson was oriented from birth toward science. David Lipset's
biography (1980) is at its best in describing his early years, good for his middle years,
and thin for the last decade of his life, when Lipset began to move away from a narrative
he had begun to write in 1972. Gregory grew up in a household focused on natural history
and biology, most especially on the debates surrounding evolution and genetics. His choice
of anthropology as a field of study moved him away from the immediate family tradition,
but not so far as to be estranged from it.

During the period before World War II, he did ethnographic research in
New Guinea and in Bali. After the war, however, his intellectual path did not fit neatly
within any familiar discipline. He collaborated with Jurgen Ruesch on Communication: The
Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951), he worked with mental patients in a Veterans
Administration Hospital in Palo Alto under the anomalously created job title of
"ethnologist." And he was a participant in the formative discussions of
cybernetics, sponsored by the Macy Foundation. It was not clear for many years, even to
Gregory, that his disparate, elegantly crafted and argued essays, the "steps" of
this title, were about a single subject, but by the time he began to assemble the articles
for this book, he was able to characterize that subject, the destination of forty years of
exploration, as "an ecology of mind." The remaining decade of his career was
spent describing and refining his understanding of that destination and trying to pass it
on.

The essays in this volume were written for different audiences and
published in different settings, some of them becoming famous among groups of readers
encountering them in other contexts, who never made the connections between them. In the
same way, many anthropologists read the book that came out of his work in New Guinea
(Naven, 1936, which remains a classic) struggling with the line of thinking represented
here by "Experiments in thinking about observed ethnological material,"(1941,
p.73), but for a long time they did so without reading and making the connections to
Gregory's writings about psychological and biological subjects, and vice versa. They knew
him as a pioneer of visual anthropology from his joint book with Margaret Mead (1942),
while a separate professional community knew him as a pioneer of family therapy. Each
group of specialists was inclined to view work that did not fit into their framework as a
diversion - or even as a disloyalty. Experts on whales and dolphins read "Problems in
Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication" (p.364) and experts on alcoholism read
"The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism" (p.309) to illuminate their
own narrowly defined subject matters without fully realizing that these were examples of
wider concerns.

Until the publication of Steps, Gregory must have given the impression,
even to his strongest admirers, of taking up and then abandoning a series of different
disciplines; sometimes, indeed, he must have felt he had failed in discipline after
discipline. Lacking a clear professional identity, he lacked a comfortable professional
base and a secure income. He had also become an outsider in other ways. Having been deeply
committed to the necessity of defeating Germany and its allies at the beginning of World
War II, he had become convinced of the dangers of good intentions. The efforts to oppose
the pathologies of Nazism and Fascism, which grew out of the distortions of Versailles,
had in turn created new pathologies that were played out in the McCarthy era and the Cold
War, and continue into the 21st century. In his post-war work on psychiatry and
interpersonal communication as well, he began to see that efforts to heal could themselves
be pathogenic. His was, for many years, a lonely and discouraging journey, characterized
by a distinctive way of thinking rather than a specific concrete subject matter. It is no
accident that a group of the father-daughter conversations he called
"metalogues," especially those written in the 50s, stand at the beginning of
this volume: Daughter is uncorrupted by academic labelling and becomes Father's excuse to
approach profound issues outside of their boundaries. Most of these were published in
journals of the General Semantics movement, which, like cybernetics, offered an
interdisciplinary setting for discussing processes of communication.

It was not until the decade of the sixties that the stage was set for
an integration of the different strands of Gregory's work. As the environmental movement
began to take shape, it re-evoked his roots in biology. One of the latest pieces included
here, "A Re-examination of Bateson's Rule," was a recycling of his father's
observation in the context of his own evolving understanding. As the antiwar movement
grew, it recalled earlier concerns about the systemic characteristics of warfare. After a
long preoccupation with pathologies, framing these different topics in terms of systems
theory required a vision of the health of whole systems as well, which was to become a
central task. At the same time, a new generation of students were ready to move across
disciplinary boundaries and to think in new ways, some with a kind of daffy euphoria and
others with a courage and precision that echoed Gregory's own, bringing with them a
passion for social engagement. By the mid sixties, his papers take shape as criticisms of
the direction of human societies. In 1968, at the end of the decade, he was ready to
convene an interdisciplinary conference, bringing together thinkers from different
stations on his own journey (see M.C. Bateson, 1972). The title of the conference,
"Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation" (and of his position paper
published here in full, p.440) echoes and counterpoints the title of this volume: each
examines the patterns of mental phenomena and the world of ideas in a biological context.
Behind both of these titles lay his emerging concern for integrative changes that would
offer the possibility of ongoing systemic health. Part VI of this volume, and much of Part
V, present the Gregory Bateson of the sixties, focusing the lens of epistemology on the
issues of ecology and societal decision making.

The final paper in this volume, "Ecology and Flexibility in Urban
Civilization," (p.494) begins with the assertion that a healthy "single system
of environment combined with high human civilization (is one) in which the flexibility of
the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system,
open-ended for slow change of even basic ...characteristics (p.494)." Ironically,
this was a position paper written for a conference for planners in the office of John
Lindsay, then mayor of New York City, a context in which extreme constraint combined with
runaway change and the distinctive blindness and inflexibility of the political process.
As he emphasized again and again, the process of systemic adjustment would require self
observation and self knowledge.

Gregory had a scant decade left before his death in 1980 to map the new
discipline and to spell out the relationships between disciplines and between areas of his
own thinking that are still conveyed by juxtaposition in this anthology. During this
latter period, he wrote a few more papers designed for presentation to specialists, of the
kind that make up the core of Steps (see for instance "Some Components of
Socialization for Trance" in Donaldson 1991). He gave a great many lectures, often to
popular or student audiences, in which he echoed, in a different way, the pattern of Steps
which is to say that, by giving a portion of his own intellectual autobiography, two or
three key moments of patterning recognized, he endeavored to lead readers along the path
to his conclusions. The best of his free-standing pieces as well as some older pieces,
along with a definitive bibliography that replaces the one originally included in Steps
(which has therefore been omitted in this edition) were collected in Sacred Unity: Further
Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Rodney Donaldson (1991). He participated in two volumes
designed to contextualize his work (Brockman 1977 and Wilder and Weakland 1981). And he
set out to write two more books that would advance the discipline of "ecology of
mind" as it had emerged from his life work.

The first of these, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, (1979) is the
most readable of Gregory's books. Because it was not written for a particular professional
community, it avoids arcane references and unfamiliar vocabulary and contains a glossary
of Gregory's distinctive usages. Bateson argued that the ecology of mind is an ecology of
pattern, information, and ideas that happen to be embodied in things -- material forms. A
science which limits itself to counting and weighing these embodiments is likely to arrive
at a very distorted understanding. Gregory had begun to characterize what he meant by a
mind (or mental system) in "Pathologies of Epistemology" (p.482), where it was
already clear that a mental system was for Gregory one with a capacity to process and
respond to information in self corrective ways, a characteristic of living systems from
cells to forests to civilizations. Now he developed that characterization into a list of
defining criteria for mind. It becomes clear that a mind is composed of multiple material
parts the arrangements of which allow for process and pattern. Mind is thus not separable
from its material base and traditional dualisms separating mind from body or mind from
matter are erroneous. A mind can include nonliving elements as well as multiple organisms,
may function for brief as well as extended periods, is not necessarily defined by a
boundary such as an envelope of skin, and consciousness, if present at all, is always only
partial. This emphasis on mental systems as including more than single organisms leads
Gregory to the insistence that the unit of survival is always organism and environment.

Having described mental systems, Gregory is able to lay out a number of
other characteristics. He elaborates the notion that, in the world of mental process,
difference is the analog of cause ("difference that makes a difference") and
argues that embedded and interacting systems have a capacity to select pattern from random
elements, as happens in evolution and in learning which Gregory calls the "two great
stochastic processes." He explores the way analogy underlies all "patterns which
connect," and develops a typology of habitual errors in ways of thinking, some minor,
some potentially lethal.

The second book Gregory had planned, Angels Fear (short for "Where
Angels Fear to Tread"), was a pile of unintegrated drafts and manuscript sections at
the time of his death, which, at his request, I put together with supplementary material
to produce a co-authored book (G. Bateson and M.C. Bateson, 1987). The themes that Gregory
felt were so daunting even to angels were those of aesthetics and religion, beauty and the
sacred, largely because of the double pressures of materialism and supernaturalism.
Gregory traced destructive human actions to inappropriate descriptions and argued that
"what we believe ourselves to be should be compatible with what we believe of the
world around us,"(Ibid, p.177), and yet knowledge and belief involve deep chasms of
unknowing. He was convinced, however, that responses of awe and recognition involved
responses to pattern -- a kind of knowing -- leading to respect for the systemic integrity
of nature, in which we are all, plants and animals alike, part of each other's
environment.

There is a tendency today to encapsulate the conclusions of thinkers in
neat summaries, like those in Cliffs Notes and textbooks, a tendency that might be
described as intellectual development by caricature. There is a fluidity and a playfulness
in Gregory's later writing that resists this process, although many of the ideas appeared
after his death in other places, as part of the packages labelled as post-modernism or
social constructionism, autopoiesis or second order cybernetics. The danger in
brand-labelling schools of thought is that we rarely go back to the original texts to
discover the riches that are not captured by the summaries. Dipping back into Steps today,
however, I find the threads of connection to my own more recent work revealed and
clarified. The importance of diversity in maintaining flexibility (and resilience), the
search for basic continuities that support adaptation, including learning how to learn
from change and cultural disparity, these are themes that come directly out of Gregory's
work. Another is the importance of story as a form of thought. I find that many
formulations that are popular today but were unknown when Gregory was writing, such as
sustainability, are illuminated by his writings, both in their significance and their
vulnerability to distortion.

Lipset (1980, p.xii) commented that Gregory was "...a doubly
anachronistic man, who was both ahead of and behind his times." He was behind his
times, especially in his last decade, in that he was not absorbing the latest advances in
related fields. On the other hand, a rereading at the beginning of a new century suggests
that in many ways he remains ahead of contemporary thinking, his insights not yet fully
absorbed. This is a book full of difficult ideas that are found nowhere else and playful
ones that evoke new thinking. Reading it for the first time is vertiginous, challenging
familiar habits of thought. Rereading it is surprising, revealing new layers of meaning.
We have gained a new self-consciousness about epistemological issues but we remain puzzled
about the nature of ecological health for our civilization and haunted by the many efforts
at correction that have made matters worse. Population growth has slowed but it still
continues, while the environmental impact of each added individual is increasing. A few
kinds of environmental degradation have been headed off. School children are passionate
about whales and tigers but the loss of species and habitat goes on. The Cold War has
ended but warfare continues, proving old diagnoses wrong and old remedies ineffective.
Even as economic disparity is increasing, competition is urged with fundamentalist fervor
as the single solution to all problems. Ecological health continues to elude us and
perhaps indeed depends upon the reconstruction of patterns of thought. It is hoped that
the republication of Steps, which was delayed by problems concerning publishing rights,
will lead to the republication of Bateson's later works describing his mature science.

Over time, various decisions have had to be made about Gregory's
intellectual legacy, balancing the effort to achieve wider accessibility and authority
against his own preferences, expressed for instance in the design of conferences. One of
these has been to respect and preserve its interdisciplinary character to maintain the
ecology of ideas that he chose himself. In this volume he divided his papers into broad
categories so readers could follow a particular train of thought and then move on to
follow another strand. Donaldson has adhered to the same kind of ground plan in Sacred
Unity. Projects to deconstruct the thought of Gregory Bateson and publish it in convenient
disciplinary packages for psychologists or systems theorists or anthropologists seem
likely to reinforce existing blindness.

Within the ground plan of Steps, the ordering was basically
chronological, for the structure of Gregory's thought clearly reflected a pattern of
organic growth and development. Like an organism, it is differentiated into parts or
organs with different functions, each of which has emerged (or withered) over time in an
epigenetic sequence. Some readers feel that the underlying intellectual pattern has been
there from his earliest publications or from those they first encountered. Others, of whom
I am one, see continuity but also significant development, the incorporation of new ideas
into an emergent order. Gregory himself drew repeatedly on the history of his own learning
in communicating his ideas. There is a challenge here for every reader to study these
articles reflectively, seeking the insights about to emerge. Mind and Nature is most
satisfying to those readers who seek Bateson's own synthesis; Steps and the posthumous
publications are tempting to those who enjoy catching him at the moment of tentative
insight and making their own syntheses.

Among Bateson scholars, Peter Harries-Jones (1995)is notable for
looking at Gregory's "ecology of mind" in the context of his mature work, using
terms for it associated with that period, "recursive epistemology" or
"ecological epistemology." The processes with which Gregory was concerned were
essentially processes of knowing: perception, communication, coding and translation. Ergo
epistemology. But basic to this epistemology was the differentiation of logical levels,
including the relationship between the knower and the known, ergo a recursive
epistemology. Ideally, the relationship between the patterns of the biological world and
our understanding of it would be one of congruence, of fit, a broader and more pervasive
similarity than the ability to predict in experimental contexts that depend upon
simplification and selective attention. It seems useful to refer to Gregory's ecology of
mind as an epistemological ecology to contrast it with the largely materialistic ecology
of academic departments. It seems essential to underline that recursiveness is a necessary
feature of such an epistemology (and perhaps of every epistemology, since every effort to
know about knowing involves the cat trying to swallow its own tail).

Bateson was haunted in his last years by a sense of urgency, a sense
that the narrow definition of human purposes, reinforced by technology, would lead to
irreversible disasters, and that only a better epistemology could save us. Certainly
irreversibilities lie all around us, many, like global warming, the decay of the ozone
layer, and the movement of poisons through global food chains, set on courses it is too
late to change although we have yet to suffer their full effect. Still, the situation has
not worsened as rapidly as he predicted and perhaps he sometimes succumbed to the lure of
dramatizing a message in order to get it across in ways that later undermine that message.
But the habits of mind that he described can be seen in every newspaper or newscast: the
search for short term solutions that worsen the problem over time (often by mirroring it,
such as violence used to oppose violence); the focus on individual persons or organisms or
even species, seen in isolation; the tendency to let technological possibility or economic
indicators replace reflection; the effort to maximize single variables (like profit)
rather than optimizing the relationship among a complex set of variables.

The essays in this volume and in the publications that followed it
suggest a trajectory. What is important is to begin to move with that trajectory, to
empathize with it, in order to move beyond it, so the next step becomes obvious. Scholarly
analysis of the work of Gregory Bateson is only a fraction of the task, for analysis has
always been a means of control. It is more important now to respond. Following Gregory in
his development is probably the best way to prepare for the steps that still need to be
taken, the moments of imaginative recognition that lie ahead.

REFERENCES

Gregory Bateson. 1936. Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a
Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Repint Stanford CA: Stanford University Press,
1958.

---1942. (with Margaret Mead) Balinese Character: A Photographic
Analysis. Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences Vol 2. NY: New York Academy of
Sciences.